Dr. VanSickle developed this discussion-based course where students are able to explore various topics through recorded webinars from the National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center, peer-reviewed journal articles featuring relevant case reports or meta-analyses, and podcasts featuring voices from the relevant patient population. The course also included a formative standardized patient encounter that involved taking a sexual health history from an LGBTQIA+ patient. She plans to offer this course every January to all DMU students available to attend in person.

Dr. VanSickle and her co-author Dr. Zipfel published a peer-reviewed article that article critiques the application of non-human anatomical terminology to fossils of human ancestors, mixing Dr. VanSickle's interests in anatomy and evolution.

Dr. VanSickle was quoted for her expertise in the evolution of sex differences in the human pelvis in a LiveScience article. The news article reports on a recent study by Webb et al. that claimed pelvic sex differences are not unique to humans but exist in chimpanzees as well. Dr. VanSickle is quoted saying, "If true, anthropologists may have found an explanation for why some of our bipedal ancestors seemed to have a challenging time giving birth despite having small brains — they may have faced the same birthing challenges as that common ancestor shared with chimpanzees!"

Dr. VanSickle presented a poster at the European Society for the study of Human Evolution annual meetings in Zagreb, Croatia. Her poster, co-authored with researchers from the University of Zurich and the University of Freiburg, demonstrated how a newly developed Statistical Shape Modeling technique could be applied to reconstruct a fossil hip bone from South Africa. The hip bone, SK 3155b, has previously been assigned to the genus Paranthropus, a genus for which pelvic anatomy is largely unknown. This poster presented preliminary results of how the unknown pelvis of this species could be reconstructed for future study.

At the same conference, Dr. VanSickle was a co-author on a poster led by Dr. Schlager that described the Statistical Shape Modeling method in greater detail, demonstrating how it has been validated on other hominin fossils where more anatomy is preserved.

Dr. VanSickle presented a podium talk at the by-invitation-only symposium, "Societies, Culture, and Behavior – The next 10 years of Homo naledi studies" in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her talk focused on the status and plans to better analyze and evaluate the pelvic fossils attributed with the small-brained hominin species that lived in South Africa ~300,000 years ago.

Dr. VanSickle presented a podium talk at the Eastern African Association of Palaeoanthropology and Palaeontology (EAAPP) meetings in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Her talk focused on a fossil hipbone discovered in 1974 in South Africa. She and her co-author, Dr. Cofran, re-evaluated the hip in light of more recent discoveries, demonstrating that traditional comparative methods do a poor job distinguishing the multiple hominin species present in South Africa ~2 million years ago.